Qualitative conclusions about the mortality rate should be made on the basis of annual statistics

22 july 2015
| Izvestia

Early in the year an increase in the population mortality rate was recorded in Russia. Experts estimate that over the last decade mortality in Russia was falling year from year, reaching a level in 2013 that was equal to that seen in the pre-crisis period in the late 1990s, even though the total population of the country had decreased slightly. However, in Q1 2015 mortality went up again by 11.5% on Q1 2014.

Daria ProsanyukDepartment for Monitoring

Izvestia writes that in response to the Russian president’s
call for the causes of rising mortality to be investigated, the Civil Society
Initiatives Committee headed up by the former finance minister Aleksey
Kudrin published a report that concluded that the increase in mortality in
Russia was contributed to by mistakes made by the Healthcare Ministry. In
addition, using the mortality data for Q1, 2015 the Committee’s experts
extrapolated that by year’s end more than 2 million Russians were going to have
died. So far this dire prediction has not been confirmed: in April the number
of deaths per day was roughly the same as in April of 2014 and in May people
were actually dying at a slower daily rate than the year before.

“Qualitative conclusions about the mortality rate should be
made on the basis of annual statistics,” the deputy head of the Department for
the Monitoring Arrangement of the Analytical Center Darya Prosyanuk was
quoted by the newspaper. In her opinion, a key cause of the increase in
mortality in Q1 of this year may very well have been the fact that the fairly
sizable generation of people born immediately after the war are reaching their
70s and 80s, an age when the probability of death increases exponentially and
that may be pushing up the total number of deaths in the country.